William Trevor - Two Lives

‘D’you remember,’ the schoolteacher asked her, ‘how you used to want to work in Dodd’s Medical Hall?’

Mary Louise did. She’d wanted to serve in the chemist’s because it was the nicest shop in the town. It had the nicest smell, and everything was clean. To serve there you had to wear a white coat. Everyone knew it was special.

‘It’ll be Quarry’s now,’ Miss Mullover went on, and Mary Louise wondered if the old schoolteacher was ga-ga, since it was apparent to everyone present that she had just married into the drapery. The truth was that the counters of Quarry’s had always been her second choice. She’d clearly never said so to Miss Mullover or there’d have been a reference to it, but she’d said so at home. When she’d finished at school, a shop was the best that could be done for her; her father had said that, and she hadn’t minded, thinking of Dodd’s or Quarry’s or even Foley’s grocery and confectionery, two doors down from the drapery in Bridge Street. Word of her availability was put around the town on the next fair day, but it seemed that no assistance was required. Foley’s was reserved for the Foley girls, Renehan the hardware merchant only had men behind the counters and didn’t have to go outside the family either, with three sons. No daughter of his would go into a public house, Mr Dallon laid down, but that possibility did not arise either. For five years Mary Louise had remained at home, helping generally, waiting for a vacancy. That was what she had to weigh in her mind when Elmer Quarry displayed his interest – the long, slow days at Culleen, the kitchen, the yard, the fowl houses, for weeks on end not seeing anyone outside the family except at church or at the egg-packing station. All that was what Letty appeared to have forgotten.

‘Algebra was Elmer’s stumbling block. He could never get the hang of brackets.’ Miss Mullover nodded repeatedly over her food, lending emphasis to the recollection. ‘Twiddly brackets, square brackets, round brackets. He could never get the order right.’

‘Fat lot of use they were.’ Elmer laughed loudly, taking Mary Louise by surprise and causing her to jump. She tried to think if she’d ever heard him laugh before, and she remembered her brother saying he never did. His small teeth were all on display at once. The fat of his face was bunched up into little bags.

‘ Algebra poor ,’ Miss Mullover recalled. ‘ Arithmetic good . I remember writing that. Nineteen thirty-one or thereabouts.’

Mary Louise imagined her husband at that distant time, a podgy boy, she imagined, with podgy knees. He’d have had long trousers at the boarding-school in Wexford.

‘I saw a lot in the schoolroom,’ Miss Mullover reminded Mr Dallon as he sat down at last, the carving complete.

‘You did a great job in the schoolroom, Miss Mullover.’

Mr Dallon reached for salt and pepper. He remembered Mary Louise’s birth, how he’d been worried because she was late arriving but hadn’t said anything because that would only have made matters worse. Had she been a boy the names they had ready were William or possibly Nevil. She was called Louise after his mother; he couldn’t remember how it was that they began to use both her names. He seemed to recall saying himself that the two names had a ring to them.

‘Full of fun she was,’ Miss Mullover was remembering now – meaning, he supposed, that Mary Louise’s liveliness as a child had occasionally landed her in trouble. She’d thrown a stone once in the school yard and had been kept in; she and Tessa Enright had put worms in Possy Luke’s desk and let down the tyres of bicycles. Occasional bolsterousness, Miss Mullover had written on a report.

He supposed she was his favourite, although he didn’t like having to admit, even to himself, that favourites came into it. But Mary Louise, born when they’d thought the family was complete, had acquired – possibly for no more reason than that – a special place in his heart. Solemn-eyed, she had listened when he reprimanded her for her misdemeanours at school. At hay-making or harvesting she had a way of staying close to him, telling him about the ailments that had befallen a little mechanical chicken. When you wound it up it pecked the ground. ‘Pecker’ she called it.

‘You’re happy for her, Mr Dallon?’ Miss Mullover murmured.

He nodded. When she was older she’d wanted to be in the town, or any town. She began to go out with Elmer Quarry and this was how it had ended. It was a marriage of convenience: she knew that and he knew that and Elmer Quarry knew it. They were aware of it and they accepted it. ‘You’re certain, Mary Louise?’ he’d pressed her, and not for a second had she hesitated with her reassurance. She had an innocent way with her: that had always been her over-riding quality. Innocent of the consequences, she had committed her small, childhood sins; innocently, she had always chattered on. You could silence her in an instant; you could snatch away her confidence, and feel guilty as soon as you did so. ‘You won’t tire of it?’ he’d pressed her further. ‘The town and all that?’ Again there was the eager reassurance, leaving unsaid between them the fear he knew she suffered: of being obliged to remain in the farmhouse for ever, with half a life to live. The pretty chemist’s shop, going to dances with some tweed-jacketed young man: that had not happened, and she had concluded that time would not hesitate long enough to allow it. Alone in their pews in the church of St Giles were the Protestant spinsters of the parish, there to be observed week after week, added to at Christmas and Easter by Elmer Quarry’s sisters and others besides.

‘He’s not a troublesome man,’ Miss Mullover softly remarked, as if detecting what was passing through Mr Dallon’s mind. ‘So often when a girl marries you can see some trouble coming.’

Elmer Quarry was decent and reliable, Mr Dallon replied, his voice kept low also. Mary Louise could do worse, he was about to add, but changed his mind because it didn’t sound quite right. But Miss Mullover nodded all the same, silently agreeing that his daughter could have done worse.

At three o’clock the car from Kilkelly’s Garage arrived. Mary Louise had changed into a pale green coat and skirt, and wore a small black hat trimmed with a drawn-up veil. The night before she had packed a suitcase.

The Eddery brothers tied an old creosote tin to the back bumper, but Kilkelly’s driver removed it. When the car drove off James pedalled after it on Mary Louise’s bicycle, and the Eddery boys shouted. Everyone else waved, Letty and Elmer’s sisters half-heartedly.

‘Did the thing go well?’ The driver was the garage’s chief mechanic; he hadn’t had time to change out of his overalls.

‘Ah, it did,’ Elmer replied. ‘Smooth as velvet.’

‘Well, that’s great.’

The car stopped at the drapery. A notice in one of the windows announced that it would re-open on Monday. Elmer went in to collect his suitcase.

‘Ye’re off for the two days?’ the driver chattily went on while Mary Louise waited, and she explained that they’d be away, in fact, for eight days in all, nine if you counted the remainder of this one. When Elmer returned they were driven on to the railway junction, which was twelve miles away. They caught the five-to-four train, changed later to a bus, proceeding on their way to the seaside resort they had chosen for their honeymoon. Neither was at ease during the journey. Neither revealed that the night before there had been family opposition to the marriage. Instead they spoke of the wedding guests, and of the occasion at the farmhouse. In the months that had passed since their first visit to the Electric Cinema they had not come to know one another intimately; Each had become familiar with certain traits in the other, promoting a degree of ease that had not been there in the past; but the curiosity of affection was not present on either side. The Electric Cinema had been visited only twice after they’d seen Lilacs in the Spring: Elmer’s courtship of Mary Louise had been conducted, for the main part, during Sunday afternoon strolls that had become customary. He would walk out from Bridge Street and she would cycle in from Culleen. They met on the town’s outskirts, the bicycle was deposited in a gateway, and they walked slowly back the way Mary Louise had ridden. At a crossroads they turned to the right and proceeded along a meandering lane, down a hill, through woods and across a humped bridge. On one of these walks Elmer proposed marriage, and Mary Louise said she’d have to think about it. She spent a month doing so, and when she eventually agreed Elmer passed his tongue over his lips, dried them with a handkerchief and announced that he was going to kiss her, which he did. They were actually on the humped bridge at the time. His voice was hoarse; there was a trace of what Mary Louise imagined to be leeks on his breath. After Gargan and Billie Lyndon, she had argued to herself during the month, there had been no one else for Letty. Had there ever been anyone for his own sisters?